Emphyteusis was not ended by the Church. It was perpetuated through the domuscultae. The domusculta capracorum of Formello makes this archaeological fact and not only in the Roman campagna, but throughout Europe. At any rate, keeping the prices on bread down wasn't a Christian invention, Diocletian's Edictum de pretis of 301 was as humane as anything the subsequent papacy or European princes could have contrived and he was a pagan. It extended to all products. The twelfth century communal revolutions were anti-papal, above all in Rome! The increased activity of Roman merchants and craftsman and the improved financial status of the burghers, though not comparable to the centers of Tuscany or Northern Italy at the time because of the clerical freno (brake), made them increasingly in sharp opposition to the power of the old aristocratic clans and the temporal rule of the popes. Gradually the situation generated considerable tension and ultimately a dramatic change: in 1143 the Roman burghers set up a commune (municipality) of their own, like the free ones in central Italy and revived the designation of "senate." The renovatio senatus as it was known reawakened Roman patriotism and nostalgia for the urbs past greatness during the empire, thinking which was to become so prominant in the later views of Petrarch and the Renaissance humanists that succeeded him.
Echoes litany is tiresome. Christianity and the Church very much maintained the status quo of late imperial civilization under much less fortuitous times however. Eventually that order broke down once the necessary pressure to bear was sufficient. Paradoxically the humanist philology so praised by the Church, became the unwitting catalyst of the scientific method that eventually destroyed its dogmatic system.
Speaking of which, I'm sure Catholic ultras like Echoes don't have much of a future. Their presumption is inversely proportional to their preparation. For example when he talks about dogma, things like transubstantiation and the virginity of Mary come to mind. When Christ said "do this in memory of me" the consumption of bread and wine is incompatable with "transubstantiation." Bread and wine as in "body" and "blood" was a recurrent metaphorical theme in those times, as the Mithraic tauroctony by which the solar deity gave life to the world testifies. The grapevine and grain played an integral part in this. Transubstantiation was a term chosen by the fifteenth-cuntury Council of Florence rendered through the Byzantine delagates' recovery of the Aristotelian μετουσίωσις (metousiosis), in Latin transsubstantiatio, which separated the substance per se from the accidental quality that described it. Baruch Spinoza though, somewhat sarcastically, already asked in the early seventeeth century where all those Jesuses in blood and bones in the form of wine and bread wound up? Was it necessary to preserve the faith only through such amazing things I've asked myself?
The religious faiths have always been impregnated with mysteries, beginning with the Eleusian Mysteries that a thousand years before Christ celebrated suggestive rites in the sanctuary of Demeter. On the other hand, if it weren't studded with "mysteries" what faith would it be? The necessity "to believe" only exists for the impossible or the absurd. The possible or the reasonable are known. They can either be demonstrated, or at least a demonstration can be tried, while naturally being exposed to refutation. By contrast dogma can neither be demonstrated, nor refuted, it just must be taken at face value. This is kind of like Echoes' curious historical revisions.
Echoes litany is tiresome. Christianity and the Church very much maintained the status quo of late imperial civilization under much less fortuitous times however. Eventually that order broke down once the necessary pressure to bear was sufficient. Paradoxically the humanist philology so praised by the Church, became the unwitting catalyst of the scientific method that eventually destroyed its dogmatic system.
Speaking of which, I'm sure Catholic ultras like Echoes don't have much of a future. Their presumption is inversely proportional to their preparation. For example when he talks about dogma, things like transubstantiation and the virginity of Mary come to mind. When Christ said "do this in memory of me" the consumption of bread and wine is incompatable with "transubstantiation." Bread and wine as in "body" and "blood" was a recurrent metaphorical theme in those times, as the Mithraic tauroctony by which the solar deity gave life to the world testifies. The grapevine and grain played an integral part in this. Transubstantiation was a term chosen by the fifteenth-cuntury Council of Florence rendered through the Byzantine delagates' recovery of the Aristotelian μετουσίωσις (metousiosis), in Latin transsubstantiatio, which separated the substance per se from the accidental quality that described it. Baruch Spinoza though, somewhat sarcastically, already asked in the early seventeeth century where all those Jesuses in blood and bones in the form of wine and bread wound up? Was it necessary to preserve the faith only through such amazing things I've asked myself?
The religious faiths have always been impregnated with mysteries, beginning with the Eleusian Mysteries that a thousand years before Christ celebrated suggestive rites in the sanctuary of Demeter. On the other hand, if it weren't studded with "mysteries" what faith would it be? The necessity "to believe" only exists for the impossible or the absurd. The possible or the reasonable are known. They can either be demonstrated, or at least a demonstration can be tried, while naturally being exposed to refutation. By contrast dogma can neither be demonstrated, nor refuted, it just must be taken at face value. This is kind of like Echoes' curious historical revisions.